When I was a teenager I suffered greatly with deja vu. I asked a doctor who explained it is a processing error in the brain whereby events are interpreted incorrectly as memory, however that did not fully explain why I was able to precognate what was about to happen before it happened, even saying what someone else was about to say before they said it.

It's an extremely rare occurrence for me these days, however the sense I had while experiencing this phenomena was that what events were about to unfold I had already seen in a dream, then forgotten about until that very moment.

This led me to think about an episode of the X-files, titled ‘Monday’ where the protagonist experiences a time loop ending with a bomb going off, and only manages to escape the loop because of gradual memory (deja vu) of what happened before.

Isn’t each round of CSGO a time loop?
What if the gun skin was a premonition of the bomb exploding?

Hence I decided to create an illustration of an explosion… which led me to Anime art. This just happened to coincide with me watching the movie ‘Akira’ for the first time, which has some awesome explosions. I studied how the slides were illustrated, noting two colours for flames and two colours for smoke, and then proceeded to create a rough interplay between the two for a pattern texture.

To tie it together with CSGO further and hint at premonition in more depth, I subtly hid the bomb code numbers ‘7355608‘ into the artwork.

As this is a randomly applied ‘Anodized Multicolored’ pattern texture it can be applied to many weapon models, although in the past I’ve found the XM1014 as a great showcase for pattern designs, so have used it as an example here, I’ve limited it to just two different palettes to avoid spam.

Let me know what you think!